Out-Take - creator of beautiful books

Stu was always going to do what he wanted and he was also one of the few people who could say what he thought. I think that frustrated Andrew, who was really difficult. I think he would be the first to admit that. He was on a complete power trip, which was very much the opposite of what Stu was doing. I suppose there must have been some terrible struggles when Andrew was trying to make the Stones sound different.
Marianne Faithfull

Stu used to do all the driving; he had this thing about sitting behind the wheel. He used to turn up in that big old banger that the Stones gave him originally, the American Pontiac, which we all used to pile into and then roar a thousand miles there and back, to these gigs in the middle of nowhere. To play at the Cologne Jazz Festival he’d drive to Dover, then four hours on the ferry from Dover to Ostend, then drive to Cologne. We’d do the gig, which was like an hour and something, and then he’d drive back to Ostend, four more hours on the boat, and then from Dover back into town – all in the same night. I mean, that’s ridiculous. Stu also supplied the PA system, and he was a bugger to help; we used to say, ‘Come on, let’s grab one of these and take it in,’ and he’d say, ‘No, you don’t know where it goes.’ And he would always pack the van after a gig. We used to bring the stuff out and put it out on the kerb for him and then he would insist on putting it back into the van. ‘I’m the only one who knows how it fits back into the van.’ He was a stubborn old bugger.
Willie Garnett

While Stu lived with Glyn Johns he had the back bedroom. He had two enormous speakers at the foot of the bed with an autochanging record player on the bedside table. The first thing he did when he woke up was to drop a record on the turntable – Albert Ammons or Duke Ellington. The noise was unbelievably loud, but that was so Stu.
Colin Golding

We always got on really well. We’d have a little chat about things, and if he felt something was going completely off the wall he’d say so and we’d try to figure out how to deal with it. It’s that strange balance of methodology and madness that’s kept these major acts as front liners, and there’s always got to be somebody in the background who helps and pulls them together. And in that sense it seemed to me that Stu was the calming force, and I think they felt that was part of their security cushion and to an extent that was his importance.
Harvey Goldsmith

Stu’s need for a piano presented a few problems. Most places didn’t have any, or if they did they were out of tune or worse, and there weren’t as yet those electronic keyboards. So if you were a poor up-and-coming band with a piano player you had a bit of a problem. What were you going to do? Carry a piano around with you?
Giorgio Gomelsky

I first met Stu at Olympic Studios in Barnes at the time that the group were thinking about recording Sticky Fingers. Their contract with Decca had come to an end and it was about that time that the group was considering leaving the United Kingdom and moving to the South of France. Stu was plainly the strong, silent type, but extremely close to the band and had worked with them from almost the moment when they started out on their career. He has sometimes been described as the sixth Rolling Stone and, in particular, it was plain that Mick, Keith, Charlie and Bill confided in him and in many ways relied heavily on him. He was reticent by nature but always reliable. He was, it seemed to me, critical to the effective functioning of the group and intimately involved in their recording work.
Paddy Grafton-Green

On the 1972 tour of America, Stu would walk on-stage and play honky-tonk piano like he had been born in a barrel house in New Orleans. When he came back off the stage, he was still Stu. There was absolutely no difference. Because the focus of his life was not the performance, he was the exact same guy he’d been before.
Robert Greenfield

You could see that he was a true musician, the way his face would light up when the audience would start shouting. He was just so into his music. I thought he was just the best piano player, and I felt that he contributed a huge amount in getting the music going when they were writing songs. He and Charlie would get a groove going, they would get the foundation going, and then Mick and Keith would do all the brilliant writing of the songs and putting the words in, but they needed that good foundation to build on. I’ve seen him at parties where he would get up in a very quiet discreet way and sneak over to the piano and start playing. No one would have seen him, and then all of a sudden the groove was happening.
Jerry Hall

Anybody who plays the piano knows a good pianist has a good left hand; that’s the benchmark of a good pianist, and Stu’s left hand was the best in the business. There was nobody that could be steadier, more rock solid, and more definite and together on the left hand than Stu. In that sense he was the best of the boogie players. His timing was very good, and he was a two-handed pianist, which in this territory of music is what it’s about.
Charlie Hart

Before and after the Stones started Stu came down at every opportunity. He would come down from miles away just for a drink at the pub here, stay the night and pop off again, just to have a few hours down here.
Eva Harvey

Memories of Stu from my childhood still come to me: the way he would sit at a piano stool, one shoulder up, one shoulder down; the way he would always call me ‘sweetheart’ or ‘darling’ in his city accent which I loved; posing for me to try out my first camera at Christmas time…
P.J. Harvey

I remember when we came down through Richmond towards the Station Hotel there were people queuing all around the block to the doors of the hotel. There must have been 500 people queuing up and Stu had given us no indication that this band had such a following. He had just given us a little card which said, ‘Please let the attached bodies in.’ We went up to the door clutching this card. Inside people hung upside down on roof trusses.
Ray Harvey

Everything about Stu was incongruous then with London’s rock scene. When guys had long locks and were cramming their balls into skin-tight trousers, his hair was short and he wore baggy trousers. When everybody else was slipping and sliding in expensive boots from the Chelsea Cobbler, he was wearing those sensible shoes that my postman wore.
Marsha Hunt

Inevitably, as the Stones became world-famous and spent all their time on the road, we saw less of each other but still kept in touch. Whenever we did meet up the old friendship would resume as if we had never been away.
Brian Jackman

He was committed to the music, and he wasn’t in it just to make a few bob or to pull girls and get on telly for five minutes, or whatever. He was just such an integral part – the man you could trust in the middle of it. If you didn’t want to deal with something, Stu would, and what was great about the way he dealt with it, in his down-to-earth way, was that it was totally non-star-struck; that’s what I liked about him.
Chris Jagger